Turtle Turtle

Today we had a design meeting to basically get a sit rep (situation report) on everyone's tasks and to coordinate the coming weeks. Some design team members will be away for certain periods of time in July, which will make it more demanding on everyone. It seems like through the grapevine that the implementation team will have something for us to test on monday. We have pro-actively set up a bug reporting system using Google Code. Basically it is a free service where you can share code, report bugs, etc by inviting collaborators using their gmail accounts. This will make it easy for all the teams to coordinate and cooperate in the coming weeks when it comes to fixing the application for children consumption.

I had a request from Ali (Hardware Lead) to help in the design of the turtle. I had a cool idea of making the turtles head pop in and out of his shell. I had a design awhile back but never transferred it onto paper or bits. Ali wanted to use three servos for the turtle to have his mouth open, neck swivel and go up or down. That design would require 3 servos and it would be quite interesting but for the turtle i think we should really look into making the head go into the shell since the hand puppet is designed to make it possible. It didn't take me long to design something into 3-dimensions for the hardware team to use. Google Sketchup has been a great 3d application that i have already used for the Polar Bear puppet. It was a great tool to show the whole team and have everyone visualize what we were creating instead of scribbles on paper.

I hope hardware will take my design and create a turtle that will be able to pop his head in and out of his shell.

For those interested below are some screenshots of the simple design of having a neck that pops in and out. The principle behind the design is using a lever action to make the neck pop in and out. With a lever that is pivoting with a shorter and longer end it provides the ability for the servo on the shorter end be able to pivot the levers longer end, which in turn creates more travel for the neck. If the servo was connected to the longer side of the lever than less travel would be created for the neck. Therefore, it is essential to get the right ratio for the lever so that we have enough travel to get the head out and in the shell.